Transcript
Raveena Shivashankar RS: Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict didn’t come out of nowhere. There have been years of tension, such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgency and cross-border militant activity. But Pakistan had been absorbing TTP attacks for years without striking Afghanistan at this scale. But on October 9, 2025, it felt like a turning point. What actually happened? What was the breaking point? Why did Islamabad decide to strike Kabul directly in October 2025, and what did they hope to achieve?
Dr Raghav Sharma (DRS): It’s important to have some context, essentially, for this escalation. It’s actually a classic case of the chickens coming home to roost.
If you go back to August 2021, Pakistan very emphatically welcomed the Taliban’s victory over Kabul. And this time has shown over the last nearly five years that the Taliban have been in power. This is proven to be a Pyrrhic victory for Pakistan.
And it should not surprise us, because if we go back to the period of the 1990s, Pakistan experienced something very similar, which is, instead of Pakistan acquiring strategic depth in Afghanistan, a plethora of Islamist groups jockeyed to acquire reverse strategic depth in Pakistan. Groups like the ones led by Sufi Muhammad. Pakistan expected different results when experimenting with the same formula.
And therefore, what we have seen since August 2021, since the Taliban returned to power, is a secular increase in TTP attacks. There’s been a year-on-year increase in TTP attacks. And this is borne out by the number of civilian casualties, the number of security personnel who’ve been killed, but also the number of militants who’ve been killed.
Levels of violence are at their highest since 2015. And what we have seen is that this has proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. It also punctured the discourse Pakistan had long peddled that a heavy Indian presence during the 20 years of the Republic was being used to foment trouble in Pakistan.
It really has punctured that entire discourse. This specific attack in October 2025 was triggered by a large-scale attack that led to the death of approximately 11 security personnel in Pakistan. And that had come after the ceasefire negotiations that had been mediated by Qatar and Turkey, which had broken down effectively.
And this eventually led Pakistan to retaliate and carry out airstrikes, which, interestingly, came against the backdrop of the Taliban’s very conscientious effort to shore up ties with India. Their interim foreign minister was on a visit to New Delhi when these strikes took place, which has also allowed Pakistan to once again drop the narrative that it is India which is actually using Afghanistan as a proxy battleground to settle scores with Pakistan. And Pakistan hoped essentially that through these airstrikes, it would send out several messages.
One is going to deter possibly future attacks and signal to the TTP and to their backers in Kabul that any attacks that the TTP carries out are going to have costs. And Pakistan is free to take kinetic action in response to the attacks that it attributes to groups like the TTP. They also hoped that by targeting military installations of the Afghan Taliban, they’d be able to wear down whatever military capability that the Afghan Taliban possess in the form of military bases in the American cache of arms that they have access to.
They’re hoping that this would also wear down the Taliban militarily, it will degrade their capability essentially, and it will coerce the Taliban to eventually act in some credible way against the TTP and bring them in and deny them safe sanctuary. But what it has done, certainly in effect, is it has reinforced at a popular level anti-Pakistan sentiment across Afghanistan in very pronounced ways. It has allowed the Taliban essentially to rally people around the flag as it seeks to issue calls for unity to take on what it calls Pakistani aggression.
Third, the Afghan Taliban have sought to use these attacks to shore up their domestic legitimacy and ward off a long-running label that they found very hard to shed, which is that they’re proxies of the generals in Rawalpindi. And they have actually tried to use these attacks to underscore that “we are not proxies of the generals in Pindi. They’re attacking us primarily because we are doing what we believe is good for the national interests of the Afghan state.
Pakistan has not essentially achieved the objectives it wanted to achieve because had it done so, we would not have seen a recurrence of violence, a recurrence of tensions with the Afghan Taliban, which has carried over well into 2026. And interestingly, this also comes at a very volatile point in time.
There’s turmoil in the Middle East. Pakistan is dealing with tensions on its border with India. It is also seeing escalating levels of violence in Balochistan, where separatist groups like the BLA, for instance, have dramatically stepped up their attacks. If you actually pick up empirical data coming out from Pakistan itself, the highest levels of violence are in KPK and Balochistan.
RS: The Balochistan Liberation Army, which has stepped up its attacks and its strategies. From the outside, Pakistan appears to be fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously: the Afghan Taliban and TTP on its western border and the Baloch Liberation Army in the south. Are these connected, or are they separate conflicts that Islamabad is dealing with at the same time? And does this pressure affect Pakistan’s strategy in any way?
DRS: The Baloch insurgency is much older than the TTP. The Baloch and the TTP insurgencies came up in very different contexts. The Baloch insurgency has had many phases from the late 1940s onwards. The latest sort of round of fighting against the Pakistani state gained a lot of momentum after the assassination of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti by the Pakistani state.
The TTP, in contrast, is a relatively younger organisation that came up in the context of NATO intervention in Afghanistan. They also have very different aims. The Baloch are a secular nationalist, rather than ethno-nationalist, grouping, seeking to secede from the state of Pakistan and exert control over their political destiny.
But also, their own natural resources, and address a lot of the grievances that they have against the Pakistani state. The TTP, in contrast, aspires to have a state that is governed by Sharia law. And they don’t have a secessionist agenda.
They simply want to overturn the existing socio-political order in Pakistan, and they want to capture the state to re-engineer society and polity from the top. So, their aims and objectives are different. The context in which these insurgencies were born is very different.
Yet what we have seen is that from about 2006 onwards, there has been an attempt by the TTP to try and make inroads into Balochistan. From 2014 onwards, they issued calls for the Baloch to join the ranks of the TTP. They’ve been using it since about 2021 or 2022, so the period that largely overlaps with the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.
They’ve used that period to amplify calls to join ranks with the TTP. They are not only now calling on the Baloch to join the TTP, but they are also supporting a lot of the grievances that the Baloch have against the Pakistani state. They have expressed sympathy essentially for the Baloch to not only exercise control over their natural resources but also to find redressal for their grievances about enforced disappearances.
And they’re calling on the Baloch to join the fight against what they see as an oppressive state, or what they’d like to brand as an oppressive Pakistani state. From 2022 to 2023 onwards, what we’ve seen – again, the evidence is very sketchy in the public domain – is that… But there’s been some level of collaboration, at least a tactical level, between the Baloch insurgents and the TTP.
There are at least four Baloch insurgent groups that have joined ranks with the TTP. Minus the BLA, which is the largest, the most well-known, well-armed group. But what is noticeable is that none of the Baloch groups, including the BLA, have opposed or even given any pronounced statement on the expansion of the TTP and its activities into Balochistan – which shows that there is probably some level of operational and tactical cooperation between the two because the two essentially are interested in stretching the Pakistani forces thin by ramping up attacks in both the KPK and Balochistan. They are well aware that the Pakistani forces are stretched thin because there’s also been a buildup of tensions with India over the past. They are keen to capitalise on that.
Also, for the Baloch insurgents, an alliance with the TTP not only helps in terms of stretching the Pakistani forces thin and ramping up attacks. But it could also give them access to training. It can give them access to American arms cash. It can also help the Baloch to move their fighters into Afghanistan, where the TTP have sympathisers for a variety of reasons. The evidence is sketchy. There are ideological differences.
The two are born in very different contexts. But the available evidence suggests there is some level of tactical cooperation between the two, even though their end goals may not be the same. Ideologically, they’re not really co-travellers.
Pakistan finds itself in a fairly precarious position militarily. It is a bit stretched.
RS: In your perspective, who’s faring better militarily right now? Because you just said that, it’s a little stretched. But Pakistan has a professional army and an air force. Afghanistan, despite having no formal international recognition and a collapsing economy, seems to be holding its ground just fine. How do you assess the military balance? What gives the Afghan Taliban the ability to sustain this?
DRS: In the conventional sense of the term, Pakistan has the obvious military edge. It has an air force system, both of which are lacking in the Afghan case. The air force has practically collapsed for all practical purposes post the fall of the republic.
They don’t really have an air defence system to speak of. And the size of the Afghan army under the Afghan Taliban is much smaller. It’s dwarfed by the Pakistani army, which is a professional standing army with years of experience in dealing with counter-insurgency.
We’ve seen that the Pakistanis, both in 2025 and 2026, have shown that they possess the ability to strike at will, where and when they want. They can choose the timing and the scale of kinetic action that they want to initiate against the Afghan Taliban.
We should bear in mind that the Taliban is an ideological movement. It’s a movement that has had 20 years of experience in fighting NATO, which is comprised of army men deployed from perhaps the most well-resourced armies in the world, including the United States. They were able to essentially get the better of them. They therefore can resort to, over a long period of time, if push comes to shove, the ability to resort to low-scale guerrilla warfare, which can be fairly bloody for Pakistan.
More than resorting to guerrilla warfare, they also have the ability to unleash suicide bombers, which would infiltrate not just from Afghanistan into Pakistan, but they have a fairly active network within Pakistan, which, if activated, could actually suck both countries down into a fairly bloody conflict spiral. And the third thing which has come up is that they have not shied away from using drones.
And again, the Afghan Taliban are not the only ones who’ve been doing this. They’ve been observing very carefully what the Iranians have been up to over this long-running conflict they’ve had in the Middle East.
And they’ve used these drones, although not to the same effect, and they’re studying that very closely. They have the capability in the long run to inflict costs on the Pakistani state and Pakistani society by unleashing suicide bombers and by using drones, but also by ramping up ideological indoctrination, which is a fairly pronounced yet underrated challenge. Pakistan will also pay costs in the long run, even though in the short run, they may seem to sort of hold sway.
And the fact that the Middle East has been in turmoil for the last two to three months also limits the ability of these Middle Eastern countries to mediate this conflict in the manner that they had done in 2025. The area of diplomatic options is also limited for Pakistan in terms of who will win.
RS: Afghanistan seems to have more leverage than Pakistan. Even though it doesn’t have a large army like Pakistan, it does have drones. It has better military tactics. So it’s doing much better than Pakistan?
DRS: Afghanistan has drones; I wouldn’t say necessarily better military tactics. It has the ability; it has battle-hardened fighters who fought a 20-year-long insurgency.
They have a lot of experience in the terrain that Pakistan is fighting in as well. They know how to mount suicide attacks and use IEDs, which were absolutely lethal for NATO while they were in Afghanistan.
They are deeply embedded in local networks, which gives them an added advantage vis-à-vis the Pakistani state. Because we have to keep in mind the fact that there are grievances, genuine grievances against the Pakistani state in the local tribal areas. And that has played out in two ways.
One is that it’s galvanised to a certain extent, groups like the TTP, which have played on local grievances. But it’s also led to mobilisation in the form of the PTM, which has got very little coverage. And these people are essentially protesting against enforced “disappearances and collateral damage” that have come about as a consequence of Pakistan’s kinetic actions in not just Afghanistan but also the tribal areas to flush out people who are not pliable to the Pakistani state. There are genuine grievances, and they’ve capitalised on that fairly well. So, they can inflict costs; even though, on the military front, the dice may appear loaded in favour of Pakistan for now, they can wage asymmetric warfare.
RS: Does Afghanistan have any international support?
DRS: What we’ve seen is that the Afghan Taliban may be isolated in the sense that it’s only recognised by one country.
But what we have seen is that the Afghan Taliban have invited calls for mediation from international actors, but no country has really condemned the Afghan Taliban for what has played out with the Pakistanis over the last couple of months since 2025. There have been concerns that countries have raised about the terrorists, not specifically the TTP. So they have actually managed to salvage the situation diplomatically because they’ve not really been justified in any meaningful way.
In fact, if you look at the reports that came in when mediation efforts were underway in 2025, unofficially, the diplomats, even from the Middle East, were very critical of the Pakistani delegation and their attitude towards mediation efforts. And they were not really critical so much of the Afghan Taliban. They said it’s the Pakistani negotiators who are making things really, really difficult. So, they have actually done fairly well in managing the situation at a diplomatic level.
RS: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a defence pact last year, but so far, Saudi Arabia has not visibly stepped in. Meanwhile, it was Qatar and Turkey who broke the ceasefire and not China, even though they have enormous economic leverage over both Islamabad and Kabul. So what’s going on diplomatically? Is China sitting back, or is it quietly supporting either side? And what is Saudi Arabia’s actual position here?
DRS: Countries like Saudi Arabia, even Qatar at the moment, have been sucked up; their diplomatic and geopolitical energies have all been sucked up by the war in the Middle East.
This is really a sideshow for them because they have far larger stakes in terms of what’s been happening visibly, the conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel, because that has a direct bearing on their security. They are really stretched to the hilt, and they’ve therefore not been so involved in the latest conflagration that has played out since March 2026, between the Afghans and the Pakistanis.
While it’s true that the Chinese sort of sat it out in the first round, in the second round, interestingly, while Pakistan was pitching itself as a mediator in the Iran war to the Trump administration, Pakistan itself was soliciting the services of Beijing to hash out differences essentially with the Afghan Taliban. And the Chinese actually hosted an Afghan and a Pakistani delegation in the city of Ürümqi to get dialogue going between the two sides. And basically, all they could get the two to agree on was that they’d continue talking. But there was no ceasefire. There was no agreement that they came up with. In fact, what we see is that around the 28th of April 2026 onwards, there was a renewed round of hostilities triggered by Pakistan bombing Asadabad, which is the capital of Kunar province, with actually there being no clear trigger point as to why Pakistan did that.
The Chinese essentially tried to step in late March without much success. The Pakistanis are not too thrilled about the kind of role that the Chinese have gone on to acquire. If you look at what has transpired since August 2021, the Chinese have had the maximum number of bilateral engagements with the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan is at a distant fifth or sixth.
And this is very telling because in the 90s, the Chinese, while they never had any official links with the Taliban, had one of the best unofficial working relationships with the Afghan Taliban, thanks to the ISI.
Today, the roles have flipped to the extent that the ISI was keeping the door open for them. Today, the Chinese are mediating between the Afghans and the Pakistanis. The Chinese essentially are not interested in this conflagration playing out and stretching out over the long run. And that is not because Afghanistan holds any special place for them. They are not interested so much in terms of who governs Afghanistan and what happens there, but what they are concerned about is that any instability from Afghanistan has the potential to spill over and possibly suck in Pakistan, and it could spill over into neighbouring Central Asia, where the Chinese have both huge investments and interests at stake.
So they don’t want that instability essentially to spill over. And that’s what’s been driving the Chinese to try to get the two to iron out their differences. But what this latest round of negotiations has shown is that while China wields influence, it wields economic leverage.
It has been offered to the Afghans that we weld you into the BRI initiative. There are economic takeaways that are hard to resist. But what it does show is that there are limitations to these economic leverages. It does not necessarily translate into policy outcomes of the kind that a state may desire.
While they may have real economic leverage, they’ve not got the Taliban to change their course on giving sanctuary to the TTP or to shed some of their ideological positions on how they see the world. So there are limitations to that.
RS: The Iran war has grabbed everyone’s attention and priorities. So does the Iran conflict affect Pakistan in any way? And does it give any advantage to Afghanistan?
DRS: Yeah. Well, the Iran conflict has reverberated at an economic level for so many countries, including India. But Pakistan, of course, feels the reverberations of conflict in Iran in a far more pronounced way than we do. And that is because it geographically abuts Iran.
So, yes, oil has become more costly. Energy costs are up. And that is going to strain Pakistan’s coffers. It’s going to strain an economy that is already stuttering. So economically, it’s going to be a challenge. It has disrupted trade to an extent. But more importantly, it has the ability for Pakistan’s societal cleavages to be exacerbated.
There is a huge potential for sectarian conflagrations. And that is because Pakistan has a history of using sectarian groups for political ends. Pakistan has one of the largest Shia Muslim populations outside of Iran.
And the Shias in Pakistan over the last many decades have also been subject to violence. But the Shias have also seen a lot; like the Sunnis, they’ve also seen a lot of sectarian mobilisations coming about. The sectarian mobilisation has been fanned by not only domestic political actors but also by external actors, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, who’ve jockeyed for influence in this part of the world.
And we’ve seen the kind of violence that played out in the immediate aftermath of America’s actions in Iran, which again underscored that this is a vulnerable point socially for Pakistan. And this could sort of flare up in the long run. Coupled with that, you know, it’s Pakistan’s very volatile Balochistan province that shares the border with Pakistan.
So, you know, while things appear stable at the moment, if instability resumes, if the regimes in Iran get shaky, Iran could also have trouble in its system, Balochistan province, which means that it could provide sanctuary to Baloch separatists from Pakistan. And Iran may be willing to use that as a pressure point because Iran has not had a very good history of treating its own Baloch minority in the province. So, yes, I mean, this conflict does inflict vulnerability as far as Pakistan is concerned.
It does sort of, you know, have this element of uncertainty because the Iran war comes at a time when Pakistan is economically not doing great. Its resources are stretched, its security personnel are already stretched because of tensions with India and a need to fight both the Baloch and the TTP insurgencies, and it is seeing tensions with the Afghans. So it certainly does; you know, it does exacerbate the kind of pressure that Pakistan is facing, something it didn’t face in the 1990s when the Taliban were first in power. So it is in a far more delicate position than it was in the 1990s.
RS: What about India’s position in this conflict, as we haven’t taken any formal positions so far, but India and Afghanistan have historically had warm ties? And Pakistan, under pressure, is not really entirely against India’s strategic interests. What is India’s position here? And is there a role India can or should be playing?
DRS: India has issued vociferous statements at an official level. If you look at the MEA press briefings, you look at some of the proceedings of the UN Security Council. India has been fairly vociferous in condemning Pakistan’s airstrikes on civilians.
While it’s good that we’ve condemned the airstrikes and civilians, this makes for a very stark contrast with India’s deafening silence when it comes to access to education for girls. When it comes to the Taliban’s domestic policies, there’s been a deafening silence, so it makes for a very jarring contrast. And again, India is the norm; it’s not the exception.
Most of the states around the world, including countries of the European Union, were on the moral high horse; essentially, their rhetoric on all of this has petered out. And that is because all states are in a transactional relationship with the Afghan Taliban. But I think while it’s fine to condemn attacks on civilians, I think we should not get too involved in the conflagration between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And that is because we don’t want to give credence, or we should not be seen as giving credence, to claims that the Pakistanis have been advancing, that, look, we told you so. You know, the Indians are using the Taliban as a proxy, and they’re using Afghanistan as a proxy battleground to settle scores with us. That doesn’t go with our interests.
It also makes for a very jarring contrast with the fact that while we say that we condemn civilian casualties, and we talk of people-to-people ties, we don’t issue visas to the Afghans, even for education and medicine. So I think we have to be very cautious in terms of what kind of approach we take. There’s very little leverage that we have with either side to mediate the conflict.
What we should be looking at is to see how we can play this to our advantage to build on the existing set of ties. What are the areas of intervention that the conflict opens up for us? For instance, it’s led to a lot of displacement, internal displacement in Afghanistan. And there’s been a lot of demand essentially for India to rekindle a lot of its development initiative projects in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has forcefully repatriated millions of Afghans. Its shelling has dislocated many Afghans. There is a huge humanitarian crisis brewing.
So, where is it that we can step in? Because that is what eventually created large constituencies of goodwill. What we’ve also seen is that conflict with Pakistan has disrupted trade to a very significant extent. We shouldn’t forget that Pakistan was one of the largest trading partners, alongside Iran, of the Afghans.
And what has happened is that because of border tensions with Pakistan and because of the conflict in Iran, border trade essentially has been disrupted, causing huge losses to Afghan traders. It’s also led to losses for the Afghan treasury. About 40 per cent of the Afghan government’s revenue came from customs revenue. That revenue stream has been disrupted. So what is it that we can do essentially to build capacities, to help the Afghans find alternative markets, to support livelihoods? I think these are the areas of intervention that we should be focusing on. And we shouldn’t let the theatrics essentially distract us from pursuing our larger goals.
RS: Do you have any final remarks on this discussion and on this topic? How do you see this conflict that will evolve in the coming months?
DRS: I frankly don’t think that this is going to go away anytime soon. What we should be mindful of is the fact that Afghanistan and Pakistan are neighbours. Pakistan is going to be around and exercise influence and leverage over Afghanistan in a way that we will not be able to because of a lack of geographical contiguity.
The Pakistanis have economic and ethnic ties, and therefore their presence is something we’ll have to contend with. We should also keep in mind the fact that no situation between neighbours is ever constant. One shouldn’t get too carried away with what is happening at the moment.
We should really try to focus on the larger picture in order to secure our interests. And theatrics and rhetoric really shouldn’t distract us from that goal.
Also, we should keep in mind the fact that the Taliban-Pakistan relationship is not a black-and-white relationship. It is not a classic patron-client relationship either. There’s always been some give and take.
There are some issues in which the Taliban and the Pakistani state have happily collaborated, and there are other core issues in which the Taliban have refused to cede ground, be it the Durand Line or the issue of the TTP, because it is an ideological movement. It’s not a classic political party that has come to power merely with different ideologies. It’s a very different kind of political animal. This is something we ought to bear in mind when looking at these realities.
And the third thing we ought to be aware of is the fact that this is also a very changed context. It’s a context in which the Taliban are far more diplomatically engaged. Pakistan is not their only lifeline to the world. But this is also a period where we’ve seen China’s footprint grow, not just in Afghanistan but in many parts of India’s neighbourhood. So we cannot take the rhetoric of people-to-people ties, goodwill for India, etc., for granted. We are operating in very different realities, in very complex realities.
Dr Raghav Sharma is a Professor and Director of the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal Global University, India.
Raveena Shivashankar is the digital media associate at Gateway House.
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